The Civil War revealed what united as well as what divided Americans in the nineteenth century—not only in its deadly military conflict, but also in the broader battle of ideas, dueling moral systems, and competing national visions. Adam Arenson focuses this cultural civil war in St. Louis, the largest city along the border of slavery and freedom. From this vantage point, the Civil War era looks less like a fight between North and South over slavery or the West as a prize, and more like a messy struggle between northerners, southerners, and westerners, a clash among three incompatible regional visions, whose leaders argued about the definition and importance of Manifest Destiny and slavery politics. Arenson weaves this political history with analyses of paintings, architecture, and other cultural products, paying particular attention to institutions such as universities and railroads. The result is a vibrant history of the Civil War era from the heart of the Republic that enriches our understanding of America at a crossroads.

Adam Arenson is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Manhattan College in the Bronx. He writes about the history and memory of North America and the global nineteenth century, concentrating on the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, as well as the development of cities. Arenson has also written for The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic.

Full bio: Adam Arenson researches, writes, and teachs the history and memory of North America and the global nineteenth century. His work has concentrated on the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, as well as the development of cities--from California to the Yukon Territory, from the province of Ontario to St. Louis to El Paso.

Writing accessible history, and engaging a wide audience, is important to him. He has written about his scholarship for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Arenson has been a contributor to Civil War Memory and the Making History Podcast. His latest popular publications can be accessed via adamarenson.com.

In his urban-studies research and teaching, Arenson aims to reconstruct how residents made sense of their surroundings. He uses digital-history methods to supplement the written record with material-culture findings and geographic information system (GIS) analysis. He is exploring the opportunities offered by data mining, database construction, and visualization, in collaboration with the open-source spatiotemporal data foundation MapStory.org.